Culture ↑

My interests span contemporary art, which has surrounded me ever since my infancy, music, especially from Mozart up to the mid-Romantic period, as well as well-sung English choral music from the sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. I have worked in the field of culture and media in various capacities.

• Yvonne, princesse de Bourgogne: Gerard Mortier shuts his bolt pretty triumphantly
• An amazing mixture of Roland Petit, the Corps de Ballet and Proust
• I have been known to enjoy Rosenkavalier... sometimes
• Idomeneo: a lyrical turning-point
• Benjamin Millepied takes Paris by storm
• The French themselves don't realise how beautifully French Les Troyens is
• Chopin: such appropriate music for a ballet
• La Dame aux Camélias: crusty old fogeys, jumping for joy
• Capote and the death penalty: turning the clock back to 1967
• Would the Social Register types in New York hate Haneke too?

Literature ↑

My favourite authors are those who wrote after the turn of the nineteenth century, but before the death of Camus, which still leaves quite a wide range. This happens to coincide with the so-called période grammaticale, a period during which form was deemed to matter more than substance, not because substance did not matter, but because form was the surest way of gauging the true value of the substance behind it—a view with which I heartily agree.

• Why does literature seek to give meaning to the yearning for death?
• Is Nancy Mitford no longer understood?
• Jonathan Littel is no match for Julien Green
• Capote and the death penalty: turning the clock back to 1967

Personal ↑

This includes a wide range of miscellaneous topics—inevitably inducing an impression of boundless eclecticism.

• Introducing Policymakr
• Stuff I couldn't do without in 2011
• A better new decade?
• Stuff I couldn't live without in 2010
• Reorganising this blog
• Turn-of-the-decade tribulations
• A time to gather stones together?
• Why I have finally decided to blog in my own name
• Why I've decided to keep a blog

Politics ↑

Politics are hardly a side interest, as can be seen from the articles collected here. I first indulged my taste for politics and current affairs at Oxford at the Oxford Union Society, and then as a student in Paris, where I was President of Conférence Olivaint.

• Brexit would be constitutional and economic suicide
• The absurdity of Brexit
• Pooling Anglo-French defence: a sign of progress, or of decline?
• Can the Fifth Republic survive M Sarkozy?
• What should a Tory government stand for in 2010?
• A plea in support of Mr Obama's perfectible health-care bill
• Does French tech have any future at all?
• Wither France's institutions? The tragic and unlamented end of a thirty-year golden age
• Of the virtues of representative democracy
• Will Mr Obama bring the United States any closer to abolishing the death penalty?
• The man who dreamt of a modern, rich, democratic, peaceful Iran
• I guess a moratorium, if we get one, is better than nothing
• Capote and the death penalty: turning the clock back to 1967
• Don't let the French president get elected by chance
• Abomination in Iran

Religion ↑

Like the first Queen Elizabeth, I firmly believe in not putting windows into men’s souls (Collinson, Patrick (2004). Elizabeth I. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Yet like the second Queen of the same name, I take my religion (relatively) seriously and have occasionally shared thoughts about the subject here.

• Benedict XVI: a traditionalist, yet more in tune with the realities of this age than his predecessor
• Does being for the Liberty of England still mean being for the Protestant religion?
• The four traditionalist bishops: were they ever validly excommunicated?
• Feminists and Homophobes have destroyed a unique four-hundred-and fifty-year-old English compromise
• Oh, so the Pope abolished Limbo, did he?
• And the Word was made flesh. Got that?

Sundry ↑

These articles don’t fit neatly into this site’s topics. Their presence here probably bears witness the incorrigible eclecticity of my range of interests.

• Sixty years a Queen, with unflinching grace and steadfast devotion to duty
• The welcome trend away from anonymous posting on the Internet
• Should France change her national anthem?
• When in France, don't ever wear brown shoes after 6 pm
• Cheap Monday or how to be thin, poor and fashionable

Tech ↑

Subjects I’m passionate about include code, good web design, Net neutrality, and avoiding government interference in the Internet. I write a lot about Apple-related stuff, blogging techniques and trends in social networks.

• Connecting WordPress, Lightroom and Apple Photos
• Preparing this site for the 2020s
• Google's Google Fi revolution
• How I effortlessly draft and maintain squeaky-clean CSS with SASS and Compass.app
• Switching from a (dv) to a (ve) server on Media Temple
• Sparrow Mail: the most elegant, powerful and minimalist Mac email client
• Reeder for Mac: a stunning implementation of minimalism, elegant design and practicality in one RSS client
• Backing up a Mac to Amazon S3 with Arq: the easiest, safest and most accurate solution
• The new MacBook Air: with its first-rate GPU and SSD, its real-life performance belies the paper specs
• iTunes and Steve Jobs’s walled garden: a major strategic blunder for Apple
• What’s ‘open’ anyway? Walled gardens will never stifle innovation and shouldn’t be confused with Net neutrality
• Did you even know Facebook has unilaterally decided to share all your data with anyone it pleases?
• Improve your WordPress blog with MarsEdit, Amazon Cloudfront and Markdown
• Social networking: going towards an oligopolistic closed-shop system?
• Why I have finally decided to blog in my own name
• Blogging sequentially using Writeroom, TextMate and ecto or MarsEdit